Manfredi’s series TRA draws inspiration from the ancient Neapolitan figure of the femminiello, a revered presence considered spiritually favourable. The work pays homage to locals who live outside binary gender expectations Roman Manfredi: ‘I feel that conversations around queer identity are often shaped by white North American and northern European academic frameworks.

I was interested in looking beyond these contexts to explore how gender is embodied and lived through other cultural and historical perspectives. As my ancestry is Italian I sought a place that I felt was not only accepting but celebratory and respected in Italy. That led me to Naples and the femminielli’ Photograph: Roman Manfredi While dual-spirited identities have often been acknowledged in male-assigned bodies, female-born expressions of gender variance have historically been dismissed or disparaged, often carrying cultural and class-based stigma Following the discovery of an archival photograph of the artist’s nonna, in a scene that is seemingly the wedding of two women, Manfredi wondered whether there may have been another experience of queerness in the family, deepening the desire to explore local histories The word “tra”, Italian for a state of being between, among and within, speaks in this work to an energetic space where masculine and feminine converge and dissolve, and categories blur into something more elemental The relationships of people and place that Manfredi captures are further emphasised by the artist combining medium-format colour portraiture, grainy point-and-shoot and slow monochrome Super 8 film Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 5 is part of Season of Photography 2026, a celebration of photography in Scotland.

Manfredi’s work is being shown alongside that of another artist, Sayuri Ichida